Note 3 — CONTENTS

One might say of this achievement what the author of Lettres Persanes said of his book: Proles sine matre. It is a child without a mother. It is, in short, unprecedented.3 It has not its fellow, either in the Machal of Solomon, or the apologues of the old fabulists, or the treatises on natural history written by our modern scientists. The fabulists look to find man in the animal, which for them is little more than a pretext for comparisons and moral narratives, and the scientists commonly confine their curiosity to the dissection of the insect’s organs, the analysis of its functions, and the classification of species. We might even say that the insect is the least of their cares, for, like Solomon, they delight in holding forth upon all the creatures upon the earth or in the heavens above, and all the plants “from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall” (1 Kings iv: 32–33).